Welcome!

By registering with us, you'll be able to discuss, share and private message with other members of our community.

SignUp Now!

Duke Basketball 2017-2018

Wasn't the class of '14 the best Duke hoops recruiting class ever up until that point? That is what I read into the comment of "generational levels of elite talent."
 
Sometimes random luck is the best explanation. We could have 100 years of NCAAT champions and advanced stats to look at, and a good chunk of them will still be outliers that force us to either need to stretch for explanations or admit that we can't break everything down rationally.

If you slot Kentucky 2015 as the champion that season, things make more sense. Sam Dekker catching fire from 3 won Duke a title just as much as anything Duke did that season.

Duke 2018 is probably going to break the mold in a lot of ways if it wins the title. Of all our teams since 2010, it would be among the bottom half in terms of likelihood to win the title on preseason paper, IMO, along with 2012, 2014 and 2016. The scientific explanation at the end, if we absolutely must find one, would be something like "stacked with talent."

If I could short Duke 2018 financially, I would. The only veteran leader is unstable and nationally disliked at an unprecedented level, even for a white Duke player, the team on paper will be miserable from 3, and the coach has produced bad defenses undeniably consistently at this point.

So much has to go unexpectedly well for this team, but when you have this much talent, it makes that kind of unexpected overperformance possible.
 
Last edited:
I still think we could've beaten UK that year. UK def would've been the favorite but that would be a close game either way.
 
I would say having 2 top 10 picks + 1st rounder + 2 more NBA players + Grayson as six of the 8 players (Amile, Matt Jones) getting PT as a significant concentration of talent. You can nitpick the "generational" part, and that's fair, but that's an outlier even among an average Duke team.
childress22 said:
dukedavidson13 said:
Obviously this is super quick/rough analysis, and there are better ways to do it (% of minutes played by upperclassmen, % of usage, etc.) but I will leave that to SMTTEM and other people who are better at this sort of analysis. Nonetheless, all of these teams had 3+ scholarship uppeclassmen on the team, and the teams with the fewest upperclassmen had generational levels of elite talent (Duke in 2015, UK in 2012, 2011 was a weird year but Uconn had Kemba who had enough leadership/intangibles for 2-3 players), and Duke's #s are low but as are weighted up based on share of scholarship players.

I can only hope we break this trend...

*Edited for spelling
Click to expand...

I love our 2015 team, don't get me wrong, but I don't know by what metric they had "generational levels of elite talent." They had a number of good college players who played their roles well.
Click to expand...
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
Sometimes random luck is the best explanation. We could have 100 years of NCAAT champions and advanced stats to look at, and a good chunk of them will still be outliers that force us to either need to stretch for explanations or admit that we can't break everything down rationally.

If you slot Kentucky 2015 as the champion that season, things make more sense. Sam Dekker catching fire from 3 won Duke a title just as much as anything Duke did that season.

Duke 2018 is probably going to break the mold in a lot of ways if it wins the title. Of all our teams since 2010, it would be among the bottom half in terms of likelihood to win the title on preseason paper, IMO, along with 2012, 2014 and 2016. The scientific explanation at the end, if we absolutely must find one, would be something like "stacked with talent."

If I could short Duke 2018 financially, I would. The only veteran leader is unstable and nationally disliked at an unprecedented level, even for a white Duke player, the team on paper will be miserable from 3, and the coach has produced bad defenses undeniably consistently at this point.

So much has to go unexpectedly well for this team, but when you have this much talent, it makes that kind of unexpected overperformance possible.
Click to expand...
This is a well-put. My comment was more to say that the two ingredients that seem necessary for a title are experience and talent (duh), but most championship winning teams have appeared to have a good amount of both. We will be extremely deficient in one aspect, and can only hope to that our one player providing leadership and experience can do so to such a degree that we have a shot in March/April. And hope that talent base gets us within spitting distance of how far Grayson can lead/teach the team to take those last few steps necessary to winning a title.

To do it more properly, I'd basically try to reverse-fit the data to the outcomes in the way that Bill C does for pre-season S&P+ ratings in football using all teams and tournament results, not just champions. Talent would be defined as some mix of future NBA draft position and high school recruiting rankings (to try to account for player improvement/starting point) and experience defined as cumulative share of minutes on court in competitive/close matchups + some gradual benefit over time from participating in practice (i.e. Trying to solve for Zoub, Marshall becoming positive contributors as upperclassmen).
 
dukedavidson13 said:
I would say having 2 top 10 picks + 1st rounder + 2 more NBA players + Grayson as six of the 8 players (Amile, Matt Jones) getting PT as a significant concentration of talent. You can nitpick the "generational" part, and that's fair, but that's an outlier even among an average Duke team.
Click to expand...

Definitely a great concentration of college talent, or pro talent if draft status is considered as a primary factor in evaluating the three freshmen rather than performance. If we're looking at actual NBA success, it's obviously too early to tell, but my guess is that it won't be an outlier for NBA success.

just some other (non-ship) years:

2009: 4 1st rounders (Henderson, Miles, Nolan, Elliot Williams) + Singler and Thomas as 6 of the 9 players getting PT (a 7th was Scheyer, an All-American the next year)
2011: A #1 overall pick, + 3 first rounders (Miles, Mason, Nolan) + 4 other NBA players (Kyle, Andre, Ryan, Seth)
2012: One top-10 pick (Rivers), 2 other first rounders, (Miles, Mason), + 4 other NBA players (Andre, Ryan, Seth, Quinn).
2014: Okay, not as much depth of talent, but should end up with two guys who logged 20+ ppg in an NBA season (Parker and Hood), plus 3 other NBA players (Marshall, Quinn, and Dre).
 
childress22 said:
dukedavidson13 said:
I would say having 2 top 10 picks + 1st rounder + 2 more NBA players + Grayson as six of the 8 players (Amile, Matt Jones) getting PT as a significant concentration of talent. You can nitpick the "generational" part, and that's fair, but that's an outlier even among an average Duke team.
Click to expand...

Definitely a great concentration of college talent, or pro talent if draft status is considered as a primary factor in evaluating the three freshmen rather than performance. If we're looking at actual NBA success, it's obviously too early to tell, but my guess is that it won't be an outlier for NBA success.

just some other (non-ship) years:

2009: 4 1st rounders (Henderson, Miles, Nolan, Elliot Williams) + Singler and Thomas as 6 of the 9 players getting PT (a 7th was Scheyer, an All-American the next year)
2011: A #1 overall pick, + 3 first rounders (Miles, Mason, Nolan) + 4 other NBA players (Kyle, Andre, Ryan, Seth)
2012: One top-10 pick (Rivers), 2 other first rounders, (Miles, Mason), + 4 other NBA players (Andre, Ryan, Seth, Quinn).
2014: Okay, not as much depth of talent, but should end up with two guys who logged 20+ ppg in an NBA season (Parker and Hood), plus 3 other NBA players (Marshall, Quinn, and Dre).
Click to expand...
You read my posts, but then ignored them? Why use NBA success? Growth while in the NBA is not something that can be attributed to talent while at Duke specifically. You disagree and want to argue that the 2015 team had a lower concentration of talent than 2012 and 2014? OK. That's not the point of the comment.

Edited: Last 2 sentences to clarify.
 
Last edited:
dukedavidson13 said:
You read my posts, but then ignored them? Why use NBA success? Growth while in the NBA is not something that can be attributed to talent while at Duke specifically. Do you really want to argue that the 2015 team had a lower concentration of talent than 2012 and 2014? OK.
Click to expand...

No, I don't want to argue that at all. Just that they're not some kind of outlier.
 


The worst player ever before being seen playing basketball, Alex O'Connell, got up on his vert test. Maybe he will be ok three years from now.
 
I watched all of O'Connell's high school videos and he looked good. I remember when Alex Murphy looked good, too.
 
O'Connell will be fine. Good length and hops. Decent looking shot, even if he lands two feet closer to the hoop than he takes off. After puberty, he should be a good two-way wing as an upperclassman.

He will follow the path of sole captain senior Grayson, sole captain senior Vrankovic, and sole captain senior DeLaurier to take the helm of our mighty '21 squad and sail them to an Elite Eight.
 
http://www.vegasinsider.com/college-basketball/odds/futures/

"Updated Wed, Sept. 27, 2:30 PM ET" Hmm.

Duke now listed at 5/1.

Was 7/1 or 8/1 right after the Bagley commit last month, so assume this is the FBI effect taking Lville and Zona down a few pegs, and consequently Duke upwards. I guess that means at least vegas doesn't think a van is going to pull up to the Butters building and drag Capel out in cuffs.
 
What are those sparkly things in Goldfarb's hair? It looked like little girl hair barrettes.
 
So it sounds like the first team is seriously Duval/Allen/Bagley/Carter/Bolden right now?

As someone who prefers blackleticism to pussy shit like "skill" and "shooting" and "winning basketball games", I'm pumped. The only value I get out of Duke basketball at this point is watching superior athletes do cool shit for a few games before they become NBA players I get to claim for the next decade, and that lineup provides the highest potential for superior athletes doing cool shit.

Gonna suck for the rest of you guys, though.
 
Pantone287 said:
So it sounds like the first team is seriously Duval/Allen/Bagley/Carter/Bolden right now?

As someone who prefers blackleticism to pussy shit like "skill" and "shooting" and "winning basketball games", I'm pumped. The only value I get out of Duke basketball at this point is watching superior athletes do cool shit for a few games before they become NBA players I get to claim for the next decade, and that lineup provides the highest potential for superior athletes doing cool shit.

Gonna suck for the rest of you guys, though.
Click to expand...

Haha. That doesn't even work though. There are at least 8 guys you could sub in for Bolden if you wanted to maximize athleticism, including Trent. And I'm including 40-year old Nate James here.
 
It's an indictment of Trent if K goes with that lineup, which is reasonable. Everything we've heard about Trent suggests he's not ready to be a good 30+ minute player at this level, which is what he would need to be to warrant moving Bagley to PF/C exclusively. I'm not even going to consider the possibility of O'Connell, Goldwire, White or Tucker being good in the near future at SG/SF (White and Tucker may be decent enough to cover college PFs, but that doesn't help anything for this team). K will need to make Kentucky basketball work for him this season.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Chat users

  • No one is chatting at the moment.

Chat rooms

  • General chit-chat 0

Forum statistics

Threads
1,062
Messages
423,228
Members
624
Latest member
Bluegrass Blue Devil
Back
Top Bottom